2 out of 5

Created by: Anna Drezen

covers season 1

There’s a whole range of “adult” animation popping up on the streaming services which… really need to pick a lane. Everyone wants to be a bit meta and have some social commentary, with hits like Bojack Horseman in the rearview, and also be all wacky weird and crude, ’cause Rick and Morty or something else. But that stuff’s hard to balance in the way those series did / have, and so you end up with these bastardized attempts at that, which are almost cringe-ingly not great at any one thing. Praise Petey is another example of this, flailing to find a tone which is either casual quirk (a la The Great North), or something a bit more biting but linear (Horseman), or just removed from reality – maybe reference anything from Adult Swim for this, but also look to the cartoon logics of hits like Adventure Time – and winding up middling, through and through. The performances are solid, and the core idea has a lot of promise (as do the episode pitches), and yet because the show can’t decide on its tone, nothing quite lands after the pilot. In that pilot, it’s all there: the mish-mashed tone, every repeating gag; there’s leeway as things are just getting going, and the curiosity of how the show will shape up. By the next episode, that’s resolved, and doubled-down on thereafter: running gags never evolve past repetition, and neither, really, do the plotlines, with “Petey” (or Petra, voiced by Annie Murphy) not really coming around to any great character change by episode ten, rather just doubling down on the behaviors she’s exhibited up to that point.

…Which can also be said of the other characters. And this would not be a big deal in a silly sitcom, whether animated or not, except that the show toys with ongoing, evolving elements, and thus invites the analysis.

The animation has no special flavor to it; this is akin to a house style that Marvel or DC might used, just applied to this medium. That said, the animation is fluid, and the emotionality of the characters – limited though it may be – is done well. There are no huge scenes, necessarily, but there’s a large cast that all look unique, and a fair amount of settings that are identifiable enough. Which is all to say that the team did a good job for what I’m sure they were tasked with, which is – as with the writing – hitting a middleground.

Praise Petey concerns the titular character, something of a failed NY socialite, inheriting a small town from her father called New Utopia, which also happens to have been a cult dedicated to her dad, and now to her. Episode by episode she discovers their odd behaviors, and makes a call as to how to modernize things around these behaviors, often hijinxing her way into discovering things maybe function better the way they are.